Twerkys

Character Poses

LETS GO PLAY IN THE WATER

11x14, prismacolor, gouache, and ink pen

huntington beach color studies

watercolors

Shooting paintings - camera settings.

One more thing… I used a Nikon D7000 with a 50mm lens to shoot this exhibit. I will usually shoot at f8 or so and as low ISO I can and keep my shutter speed at 1/60th. I shoot in manual mode and in the RAW format so that I can tweak the color a little more back in the studio. I find that I usually underexpose on site but I can get sharp pictures and there is enough information recorded to still get a good shot.

from http://muddycolors.blogspot.com/2013/10/norman-rockwell-american-originals.html

dancers doing real life stuff

http://www.incrediblethings.com/entertainment/dancers-doing-real-life-stuff/

some good poses in here. 

The Tourist

The 5 Traits of Wildly Successful People:

Love these - they all really involve going above and beyond, doing more than what is asked of you, making sacrifices and thinking wildly without a regard for a la mode.

I have a crazy idea: success isn’t just about hard work. We hear about hard work all the time—it’s what Olympic champions talk about when they get to the top of the podium and it’s what the media credits as the sole force behind billionaire entrepreneurs. But there has to be something else in the equation of obtaining unimaginable success. What other traits tipped the odds in favor of the world’s most successful people?

What helped propel their careers before they had track records?

For the past three years I’ve been fortunate enough to research and interview some of the world’s most successful people to find the answers to these very questions. Below are just a few of the traits I’ve noticed that have stood out in the personalities of people who have truly made it big:

1. Stray From the Pack

In his early twenties, Tim Ferriss, bestselling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, was running an online sports nutrition company and realized that he would be risking his businesses’ survival if he followed the industry standard of accepting payment up to twelve months after the product was shipped.

“Everyone followed those rules,” Ferriss revealed to me. “I realized I was inviting disaster and financial ruins if I risked my cash flow that way by following the standard protocol, so I insisted on prepayment. Nobody had ever done prepayment. I think that is one of the reasons why my sports nutrition company succeeded where a lot of other startups of that type failed.”

Straying from the norm isn’t easy when you’ve spent your whole life following rules laid out for you at school and at home. It takes a major cognitive shift to understand that the way things are, and have been, can be challenged.

Ask yourself what rules in your industry you accept as fact. Why do you follow them? If the excuse is “that’s the way it’s always been,” it’s time to consider pulling a Tim Ferriss.

2. Chase the School Bus

Growing up, Sugar Ray Leonard would wake up, get dressed for school, and walk with his siblings to the bus stop. As the yellow bus would pull to the curb, his friends and siblings would step up into the school bus, but young Sugar Ray Leonard, who is now a six-time world champion boxer, would refuse to get on. As the bus drove away, Leonard tightened up his sneakers and ran behind the bus all the way to school.

“The other kids thought I was crazy,” Leonard said, “because I would run in the rain, snow—it didn’t matter. I did it because I didn’t just want to be better than the next guy, I wanted to be better than all the guys.”

My generation is used to instant gratification. But Sugar Ray Leonard demonstrated the necessity to be able to buckle down for the long haul and accept that you won’t see any return on investment for years. You have to be able to stay passionately committed even when you can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel. And remember, Sugar Ray Leonard, now one of the greatest boxers in history, was running behind that yellow school bus at a time when others thought he wasn’t “boxing material.”

Sugar Ray Leonard kept at it, to the point that others thought was irrational. Turns out irrational commitment leads to irrational success.

Does what you’re working on excite you so much that it inspires an irrational sense of commitment? Are you willing to chase the school bus for years—before seeing any return? If so, keep running. If not, maybe it’s time to think bigger.

3. Create Corkboards

Peter Guber, former CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, was in his mid-twenties as a new hire at Columbia Pictures when he realized that the way the studio heads were selecting directors was archaic—based on esoteric chatter instead of real data. Guber personally took on the task of solving this industry-old problem.

He went out and got a corkboard the size of his office wall and created a matrix: all the directors in Hollywood listed down the side and all the relevant information sprawled across the top—think of it as a primitive Wikipedia for the entertainment industry.

Word spread around town about the young guy who had this crowd-sourced wealth of data on every director in Hollywood mounted on his wall. In addition to adding value and helping others do their jobs more effectively, the corkboard allowed people to take notice of Guber’s ingenuity.

“It became a tool that allowed people to recognize that I was willing to do things differently. It shined the light on me and it and gave me more currency to make more daring choices,” Guber said. He explained that, “You are in the ‘problem solving’ business—always. That’s the way it works.” This was a key trait that allowed Guber to go from being a new hire at Columbia pictures to the studio chief—in just three years.

Although HR reps fail to mention it on the first day on the job, it seems that taking risks, solving other people’s problems, and creating value—even in a formal corporate environment—could have huge payoffs for your career.

Are there any problems, even outside your job description, that you could solve? What opportunities can you create to add value to both help people as well as supercharge your career?

4. Get on "Qi Time"

Growing up in a village outside of Shanghai with no running water or electricity, Qi Lu (pronounced: chee loo) had no idea that one day he would have a corner office at one of the world’s biggest technology companies. As the President of Online Services at Microsoft, Lu has made a drastic journey to the top thanks to what his colleagues call “Qi Time.”

“During college, the amount of time I spent sleeping really started to bother me,” Lu explained to me. “There are so many books I can read and so many things to learn. It feels like, for humans, 20% of our time is wasted [during sleep] in the sense that you’re not putting that time towards a purpose that you care about.”

Although he admits it wasn’t easy, Lu has engineered his body to function on four hours of sleep a night thanks to an unusual regimen that ranges from timed cold showers to daily three-mile runs.

Driven by an unusual hunger to do more, Lu’s sleeping schedule has added an extra day’s worth of work time per week, which aggregates to nearly two months of productivity latched on to every calendar year. And he did it while still in college.

Ask yourself how badly do you want to do more. And what are you willing to give up for it?

5. Play the People Game

Shortly after graduating high school, Steven Spielberg began reducing the time he spent at college and increasing the time he spent hanging within the Hollywood inner circle. “[Spielberg] was going off to Sonny and Cher’s place all the time,” said Don Shull, Spielberg’s childhood friend. In a personal letter to Shull, Spielberg revealed that he would directly approach directors and Hollywood stars on the studio lot and ask them to lunch. And keep in mind—Spielberg was only nineteen years old at the time.

“Spielberg arranged his class schedule so that he could spend three days a week at Universal, watching filmmakers at work and trying to make useful contacts,” writes Joseph McBride in his detailed biography on Spielberg’s career. “He frequently slept overnight in an office at the studio where he kept two suits so he could emerge onto the bustling lot each morning looking as if he hadn’t slept in an office.”

“Steve knew at that early age that filmmaking is not just filming—it’s a people game. And he played it well,” said producer William Link.

While he definitely had talent on his side, so did handfuls of other aspiring directors. What helped Spielberg become the youngest director signed to a long-term studio deal was his focus on building relationships. This has nothing to do with “networking”; this has to do with making friends and focusing on people.

What little changes can you make in your life, starting today, to put a greater focus on people? What investments can you make, in both time and money, to hone the way you play the people game?

Wrapping up

Success can come in different fields, but the principles behind it are one. From Sugar Ray Leonard chasing the school bus to Peter Guber’s corkboard, these stories show the unique personality traits that tipped the scales in favor of the world’s most successful people.

Success—while defined by everyone on their own terms—is something that truly manifests itself once you make that mind-set shift and tell yourself it’s go time. Are you ready to make that shift?

Alex Banayan is an associate at San Francisco-based venture capital firm Alsop Louie Partners and the author of a highly anticipated business book being released by Crown Publishers (Random House, Inc.). For more, sign-up for Alex Banayan’s newsletter here.

From LinkedIn:

http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20131011051941-80844253-the-5-traits-of-wildly-successful-people?trk=tod-home-art-list-large_0

Graphic Design

These are the kinds of things I was working on a year ago before I got into animation. 

ha especially like the "made" plan. didn't do any of that shit. 

Mortimer lighting study

radish study

Farmers Market 09-12-13

chesapeake bay sketch

sketches

These are mostly from the spring. I like to draw my friends sleeping :) 

"lessons learnt storyboarding/editing a pilot"

Alternative title, 'All the stuff I wish I'd known before I tried to make my first pilot.'

I wrote this down as I went along, and thought maybe it'd be of use to anyone attempting the same thing. I customised it a little for the subreddit and added some awkward metaphors.

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Organisation.

Start with a final script, make boards, then voices/foley, and lock in an animatic with timings down to the frame. Give yourself a sizeable chunk of time to get everything exactly as you want it. This drastically cuts down the editing at the end and your artists won't hate you for making constant revisions.

Or… so I hear.

For me there's little worse than realising the storyboard is flawed midway through production. That document is your co-director and when it's imperfect or illogical it's like having a saboteur in an executive position.

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Watch Cartoons with the Sound Off.

I recommend series 4 of Venture Bros (the latest series, 5, has less action) for top-notch editing, and also new Adventure Time.

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Cinematic Technique.

If you're boarding the thing yourself you may want to understand setting, flow, and general theory. As such, learn about cinematic technique. Shots, terminology, etc. There's the obvious basics, like the 180˚ rule, but generally aside from the essential rules you'll feel when something isn't right due to you watching TV since infancy. If that happens, ask an experienced storyboarder for advice or research the specific kind of shot you're having trouble with.

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Ruthlessness.

Leave your animatic for a day or two, then come back to it with an axe. If something feels slow, adds nothing to the plot or just plain sucks somehow, get rid of it. Destruction is as important as creation. When traversing your plot, travel light; you can load a horse with everything you'll ever need but it won't gallop.

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Study Directors.

Studying the trademark techniques of master directors (a swift google search will get you there) offers a sort of cheat code list for making shots interesting. Plumb the work of classic directors, not just modern ones, as directors like Jacques Tati and Sergio Leone were really on the money even way back when.

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Immersion.

There are lots of ways to achieve viewer immersion. In the animatic stage have After Effects make the camera move - even if it's only slightly - when a character walks, climbs, flies, etc., or when something/someone is being revealed. It makes you feel more like you're actually there.

We didn't get chance to achieve much immersion at all due to inexperience, and I really regret it. Everything you can do to suspend the viewer's disbelief ought to be done.

Other immersive techniques are blurring foreground/background (though not focus pulling mid-shot unless it's an artistic decision), not choosing shots that are unlikely for the scene (eye-level, rather than on the ceiling) unless you want the audience to feel disconnected from that character, and if you're cutting to a character as they speak it's good to lead them a bit by allowing a fraction of a second at the beginning of that shot before they talk. It's less jarring.

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Suspense.

Receiving a new face is an event, and having dialogue arrive at the same time can be overwhelming to the viewer. If you're bringing a new character into play, see if you can't make it so we hear their voice before they appear on-screen. It also adds light suspense.

In fact, having gentle suspense throughout is a great way to keep the work engaging. It's kind of cheap, but little cheap moves are simply meeting the audience's expectations of engagement. Honestly the primary things people want to see in the mainstream are sex, violence and wealth so if you're in cinema with a "high art" approach you'll have trouble getting stuff picked up. It's a hard pill for a young director to swallow but it's true.

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Sound.

To me there are four aspects to cinema. What you can see, what you can hear, what you interpret, and - a lesser aspect - what is not there. Seeing and interpreting are the artist and writer/director's domain, respectively, and "what's not there" is more elusive and I haven't properly defined it yet, but audio is of equal importance to the first two.

Foley sound designers are great, but if you can't find one then get yourself to an online sound archive and use the search function like a poet. Leaping from a ladder sounds like old elevator doors closing, a wall of ticking clocks sounds like rain against a window, a robot clearing its throat is a broken gearbox/manual transmission, etc.

Contacting a well-versed audio producer (every university has dozens) is invaluable, as you'll need to EQ the final audio track/s so everything sounds cohesive at the end - I recommend exporting your dialogue track and sound effects track separately, and sending music files as well as a music track so they have both the uncompressed music files and the timing of when they should appear.

In animation voice actors are the difference between having something watchable and something unwatchable. Put an ad out on VoicesPro for a "lo-paid" job. If you're at university you have a recording studio, or else they may have their own, or you know a band who have their own connections and they owe you a favour or something. Throwing a professional but out-of-work actor thirty bucks/quid/beers to record something quick is totally worth it for both of you. If it's a larger project, and not a student thing, you ought to pay much more.

from reddit 

demon bunny

sketches

san francisco zoo 

san gregorio beach, ca

side hobby

A Lizard in Egypt

I finally finished this scene from "A Lizard in Egypt". I hope to turn it into a short animation soon 

original sketch 

animation tips

Animation Tips

by John Lasseter, Pixar

"When I was an animator at the Disney Studios, I had a xeroxed list of simple notes from one of the great Disney animators, Ollie Johnston, pinned to my drawing table. The list was originally written down by another great Disney animator, Glen Keane, after working as Ollie’s assistant for a few years."

"These notes have been an inspiration to me for years. Even though they were meant for hand-drawn animation, I believe that they still apply to computer animation."

1. Don’t illustrate words or mechanical movements. Illustrate ideas or thoughts, with the attitudes and actions.
   
2. Squash and stretch entire body for attitudes.
   
3. If possible, make definite changes from one attitude to another in timing and expression.
   
4. What is the character thinking?
   
5. It is the thought and circumstances behind the action that will make the action interesting.
   
   Example: A man walks up to a mailbox, drops in his letter and walks away.
   
   OR
   
   A man desperately in love with a girl far away carefully mails a letter in which he has poured his heart out.
6. When drawing dialogue, go for phrasing. (Simplify the dialogue into pictures of the dominating vowel and consonant sounds, especially in fast dialogue.
   
7. Lift the body attitude 4 frames before dialogue modulation (but use identical timing on mouth as on X sheet).
   
8. Change of expression and major dialogue sounds are a point of interest. Do them, if at all possible, within a pose. If the head moves too much you won’t see the changes.
   
9. Don’t move anything unless it’s for a purpose.
   
10. Concentrate on drawing clear, not clean.
    
11. Don’t be careless.
    
12. Everything has a function. Don’t draw without knowing why.
    
13. Let the body attitude echo the facial.
    
14. Get the best picture in your drawing by thumbnails and exploring all avenues.
    
15. Analyze a character in a specific pose for the best areas to show stretch and squash. Keep these areas simple.
    
16. Picture in your head what it is you’re drawing.
    
17. Think in terms of drawing the whole character, not just the head or eyes, etc. Keep a balanced relation of one part of the drawing to the other.
    
18. Stage for most effective drawing.
    
19. Draw a profile of the drawing you’re working on every once in a while. A profile is easier on which to show the proper proportions of the face.
    
20. Usually the break in the eyebrow relates to the high point of the eye.
    
21. The eye is pulled by the eyebrow muscles.
    
22. Get a plastic quality in face — cheeks, mouth and eyes.
    
23. Attain a flow thru the body rhythm in your drawing.
    
24. Simple animated shapes.
    
25. The audience has a difficult time reading the first 6-8 frames in a scene.
    
26. Does the added action in a scene contribute to the main idea in that scene? Will it help sell it or confuse it?
    
27. Don’t animate for the sake of animation but think what the character is thinking and what the scene needs to fit into the sequence.
    
28. Actions can be eliminated and staging "cheated" if it simplifies the picture you are trying to show and is not disturbing to the audience.
    
29. Spend half your time planning your scene and the other half animating.
    

How to animate a scene of a four-legged character acting and walking: Work out the acting patterns first with the stretch and squash in the body, neck and head; then go back in and animate the legs. Finally, adjust the up and down motion on the body according to the legs.

koala bear care

Silhouettes for Gesture Drawing Class